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Indian cinema aspires to cross the boundaries : Uday Singh MD MPA India
On the inaugural day of the Mumbai Film Mart 2013, MPA (Motion Pictures Association) India MD Uday Singh, tried to define the ways in which Indian cinema can reach out to a more global audience.
The top 10 Bollywood grosser seem to be hitting the glass ceiling of sorts and not being able to break through. We keep talking about crossover cinema and also going more main stream. My days at Sony always come back to haunt me as I used to say: “When I can get a white man to speak in Tamil, why can’t you get an Indian skin to speak in the same language.”
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There are many questions that crop up in my mind while looking at the movie – is it contextual and most importantly do we connect with the consumer? Many times, the exhibitors will reject the idea, so the onus is finally on us. Where all can we travel with the film, and to always keep an eye on such a competitive market space that makes 1,000 movies a year. |
Localising global products
This does not mean making a local version of the same global ad but to find a deeper meaning for the consumer in terms of positioning, naming, building cultural clues that make the product relevant. So what is the issue? Are the jokes too localised? Is it a difficult thing to travel culturally? These are the questions that crop up in my mind while looking at the movie. Is it contextual and most importantly do we connect with the consumer? Many times, the exhibitors will reject the idea, so the onus is finally on us. Where all can we travel with the film, and to always keep an eye on such a competitive market space that makes 1,000 movies a year.
We ventured into bit of localising global content by dubbing them into Hindi – like The Incredibles became Hum Hain Lajawaab and Stuart Little became Chhote Miyan. So when these can be done to foreign films then the same can be applied to our films to promote them globally. And we have done it in the past with Muthu: The Dancing Maharaja (1995) – a Rajnikanth film that went onto collect $6 million in Tokyo in those days.
Can we create a Life of Pie?
A Hollywood film on an average garners more than 70 per cent of its collections in today’s time from international markets. Life of Pie in China alone collected $84.3 million at the box-office – a figure that was higher than its collections in the US.
So the key ingredients for making a film with universal appeal are: Does the film strike a universal chord? Does it break through the stereotype? And, does it move beyond the song and dance grammar?
Will Smith had come down to India recently and we had a session with Karan Johar, so Will asked Karan, “Tell me one thing, why do you guys always break into a song and dance?” and Karan replied, “We pause to celebrate the moment.”
But that is where the case in point comes under the microscope as traditionally the duration of Bollywood movies used to be really long. Then there is the format, display of emotions, the movie will be star studded, the thing to figure out here is how to make the movie into transnational cinema.
So, there are a lot of examples of movies that basically just look at addressing key issues that are perennial in nature. Like in 3 Idiots, the need to conform to society, parental pressure on young students seeking success, friendship, etc. Basically, if studied, all of these are global themes and that is why they tend to make connect with a global audience. Also, another case in point, My Name is Khan, which looked at discrimination post the 9/11 attacks, travelled to nearly 64 countries.
Then you have films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – funded by foreign countries, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and Europe; produced by the Chinese and distributed on a global network and consumed by the international market.
The game plan for localising
Going forward, both digitisation and the need of advertisers will lead to further segmentation. Also, fragmentation is the order of the day. We are continually developing more content and more products to further segment the audience and grow and reach the billion mark.
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There should also be different posters, trailers and campaigns for an international audience and social media is the biggest way to do so and also to figure out how to connect with the dream kids of today. |
Content creation…
There needs to be proper backing of research – both qualitative and quantitative – to know how the audience will react to the campaign; by segmentation, raising awareness by targeting the core audience, first to get the attention of the fans and expanding the audience afterwards. Also, if there is embedded equity, if the film has embedded awareness like Eat Pray Love, the book right acquisition, the title unveiling witnessed with Skyfall. Each of these is a tool to connect with the consumers, reaching out through international film festivals by organising fan conventions, the ads, the PR and the free screenings. There should also be different posters, trailers and campaigns for an international audience and social media is the biggest way to do so and also to figure out how to connect with the dream kids of today.
Coming to distribution capabilities and strategies, the case in point is My Name is Khan – the film was distributed by Fox, released in 64 countries, shorter durations also released, dubbed in Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and Mandarin. More than 1,35,000 tickets were sold four days before the release of the movie in the U.A.E and collected over 19 million at the international box-office. So the distribution capabilities also took the film beyond traditional markets to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Norway, Iceland and Portugal with 62 per cent of the box-office collections from non traditional markets.
And that brings us to the big question – Can we create an Avatar?.
70 per cent of the highest grossing movie in the history of cinema was from overseas markets, 14, 406 screens in 106 territories. And this is just the basic distribution capabilities in a market as in every country there is someone thinking and plotting how to take the film to the consumer in the particular market. And some of the capabilities are again taking it to festivals, marketing the films well in advance, creating a digital campaign as it cuts across geographies in this day and age, localise though tactical campaigns and counter programme as it’s a very busy shelf space there.
And as Shah Rukh Khan once said, “Indian cinema is like brushing your teeth in the morning, you can’t escape it.”
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
